Linguistics 423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics
Benjamin Bergen
November
18, 2008
Summing
up grammar
We defined grammar as "the study of
what people know about how words and morphemes combine to produce meaningful
patterns."
What we've seen is that language users
have knowledge about grammatical forms, and about the meanings associated with them.
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They have
access to the meanings of these grammatical constructions
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They use them
to interpret the meanings of new words in the constructions
á
They use a
construction more when they've just used it, or when they've recently used it a
lot
This grammatical knowledge ranges in
terms of its schematicity and complexity, but is all
of the same type:
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Pairings of
form and meaning
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Learned
bottom-up on the basis of embodied experience
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Organized
hierarchically - both specific and general knowledge is maintained
simultaneously
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Widely
varying across languages to the point of formal incomparability [though
functional trends are discernable]
All this suggests that human knowledge of
grammar, like human knowledge of words, is based on embodied experiences that
individuals have, using grammar to attain physical and social goals.
Taking a constructional perspective
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Allows us to
study a much broader range of language phenomena - more than the
"core" 5% or so
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Allows us to actually
identify the functions of the structures in question, how they're learned, and
how they differ and change across languages.
Group
discussion of projects